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Beyond nostalgia, I’ve enjoyed a lot of the modern takes on the Choose Your Own… errm… Narrative style of book. Recently, my fellow commuters and I have been laughing and stumbling our way through Ryan North’s 400-page Romeo and/or Juliet, which I highly recommend. There are great independent works up at chooseyourstory.com. It’s an art form that’s alive and well, and has grown beyond the exclusive realm of children. Does a book that you read out of order, and often fail to bring to a happy conclusion count as a game? Does it warrant a post in my ‘Solo play’ series?

Cardventures: Stowaway 52 by Gamewright is a card-based version of the choosable narrative. The premise is something along the lines of being stuck on an alien ship set to destroy Earth. The assumption is that you like Earth, and would therefore like to keep this plan from happening. My initial suspicion was that the thing should’ve just been a book, and that the card-based system was a cost-cutting measure or a gimmick. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was quite wrong about this.

The card system has a few implications, two of which make it stand out for the better. First, the game instructs you to start with any card in the deck (of 52, in case the name wasn’t telling enough). This is a little bit gimmicky, but it’s oddly charming as well. You pick a card at random, and go from there. The narrative is largely about moving around the ship, and so the cards are almost all just locations, except for those which make for the second neat thing about the card-based approach: items. Ordinarily, as you choose your next node, you discard the current card so you can measure your progress later. But some of the cards are items, which you set aside for further use – some paths can’t be chosen unless you’ve already acquired the necessary item. This could be done in a book, using counters or a notepad or something, but I think it would be very clunky compared to the cards. This is a very clever mechanic that brings the experience slightly closer to a Zork.

Those rather innovative aspects do have some drawbacks. Because there’s no defined beginning, there can’t really be a defined end either. Instead, you go through until you can’t go anywhere (cards always have two choices, and you can’t revisit a card). Every card has a point value, and when you have no more choices, you count up all the points from the cards you made it through, and read one of four endings accordingly. They are… not terribly satisfying, because the game has no real sense of what narrative decisions you took, only that you made it pretty far or not far at all¹. Likewise, as mentioned, the cards themselves are by necessity basically just locations. This is more satisfying than the issue with the endings, you do get the sense that you’re frantically sneaking about, trying to avoid aliens. But it still lacks the depth that the control afforded by a slightly more linear system would have.

Cardventures: Stowaway 52 is a novel approach to the choosable narrative concept. Gamewright apparently has a second entry in the series, Jump Ship, which I look forward to trying at some point. In my first run-through of Stowaway 52, I managed to get over 200 points (the maximum is 300, and hitting this is the only way to get the winning ending). Even though the narrative itself was kind of thin, moving through all the bits of the ship and grabbing items was pretty satisfying. Reaching a node where I needed one of the items I had was very satisfying. Enough so that I think it deserves a write-up in my Solo Play series, apparently.